F.D.R.'s Conspiracy of Silence

The patient was obviously sick. As the naval doctor conducted the physical, he saw that the hands of the man on the table shook noticeably, though he was only 62. His circulation was slow, his blood pressure was about 25 points high (186 over 108), and there was a pronounced murmur in his heart as the mitral valve failed to close properly. He showed signs of an advanced case of hardening of the arteries. Listening with a stethoscope to the labored breathing, the doctor decided that the man had fluid in his lungs. The doctor's conclusion:

the man was so seriously ill that he was in danger of dying unless he drastically changed his regimen.

The patient was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the date was March 27, 1944--four months before the President was to be nominated for his fourth term, eleven months before he was to attend the crucial Big Three conference at Yalta, 13 months before he was to die in Warm Springs, Ga., of the massive stroke that, based on the medical evidence, seemed all too likely.

Rare Portrait. Yet the American people were constantly assured by the White House that despite his ravaged face and feeble manner, the President was in sturdy good health. In his new book, FDR's Last Year (Morrow), Journalist Jim Bishop, 66, explores how and why Roosevelt's true condition was concealed from the nation. Bishop's account raises the question of whether Roosevelt, given his condition, was acting in the nation's best interests when he ran again.

The book also makes it clear that once reelected, F.D.R. was derelict when he failed to brief Vice President Harry Truman on even the most major elements of American policy, including the Yalta agreements.

Bishop spent 28 months tracking down not only the era's major surviving figures, including members of Roosevelt's family, but also the minor characters in the drama: retired Secret Service agents, the long-ago mayor of Warm Springs, the undertakers who worked on F.D.R.'s wasted body. Most of them were sympathetic to Roosevelt, telling Bishop the intimate details that he needed in order to weave the kind of narrative that has given him bestsellers before (The Day Lincoln Was Shot, The Day Christ Died). Bishop has produced a rare, humanizing portrait of Roosevelt, including the fullest account yet of the President's enduring and wistful love affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, who died in 1948.

The doctor who discovered F.D.R.'s alarming symptoms in 1944 was Howard Bruenn, then a 39-year-old lieutenant commander. Bruenn, a cardiologist, had been picked by the President's personal physician, Vice Admiral Ross McIntire, who suspected F.D.R.'s heart trouble. After Bruenn reported his findings to Mclntire, the admiral not only kept telling newsmen that F.D.R. was fine, but it also seems clear that he never revealed to the President the true state of his health.

Bishop reasons that Mclntire and Roosevelt understood each other so well after eleven years together that they had instinctively entered into a conspiracy of silence. The evidence shows that F.D.R. suspected that he was seriously ill but wanted to pretend that everything was all right in hopes of remaining in office until World War II was won. As for Mclntire, he had no desire to destroy the illusions--and perhaps the political future--of the most powerful man in the world.

Mclntire died in 1959 still insisting that he had been correct in telling the press in the spring and fall of 1944 that Roosevelt was in "excellent condition for a man of his age." Dr. Bruenn, now 69 and practicing in New York City, recalls that F.D.R.'s physical condition did improve in his last year, but says that he was by no means a healthy man. Bruenn explains Mclntire's reassuring statements to the press as having been "all politics and loyalty."

After Bruenn's initial examination, Mclntire did take the precaution of prescribing digitalis for the President's heart. Roosevelt took the drug in normal doses for the rest of his life. In addition, Mclntire ordered F.D.R. to shorten his work schedule to only six hours a day, a cutback that the President docilely accepted until the 1944 race against New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey began to quicken.

Then he reverted to type. To counter rumors that he was deathly ill, Roosevelt campaigned through the streets of New York and Brooklyn in an open car while being drenched by a chill October rain.

That day his Secret Service men acted as his seconds. Twice they hustled him out of the downpour and into dry quarters, laid him flat on his back, stripped the wet clothing away, gave him a shot of whisky, then dressed him again before carrying him back to the campaign wars. Despite the day's trying ordeal, Roosevelt's smile was triumphant. Three million people--and the national press--had seen what seemed to be a vigorous man in action.

After his landslide victory in November 1944 over Dewey (who was "a son of a bitch," he said to Aide William Hassett), Roosevelt was exhausted. Still, in January he journeyed by sea and air to the Crimea for the Yalta Conference, the most momentous of the wartime meetings with Stalin and Churchill.

At times, Roosevelt's mind wandered, his voice was low, his questions trivial. Later Stalin said: "If I had known how tired that man is, I would have agreed to meet along the Mediterranean."

Even so, Bishop believes that Roosevelt got what he wanted at Yalta: agreement, however vague, on how to deal with postwar Germany; Stalin's promise to enter the war against Japan; and an accord on the formation of the United Nations. When Stalin soon broke his promises to let Eastern Europeans choose their own destinies, Roosevelt concluded realistically that there was very little he could have done about it. Discussing Yalta, he told one intimate: "I didn't say it was good. I said it was the best I could do."

Private Trial. After Yalta, Roosevelt failed rapidly. His one solace in early 1945 was the willowy and gracious Lucy Rutherfurd, then 52, whom he had loved since World War I, when she was social secretary to his wife Eleanor. In 1918, Eleanor had found a packet of scented love letters to her husband from Lucy. Screaming shrilly, according to Bishop, Eleanor confronted F.D.R. in his bedroom while their son Elliott, then seven years old, cowered near by. "Please, Babs, please," Roosevelt begged. "The dinner guests are downstairs."

When Roosevelt promised to give up Lucy, Eleanor agreed to keep living with him but never again to share his bed. This was no hardship for Eleanor, Bishop reports. She once told her daughter Anna, "Sex, my dear, is a thing a woman must learn to endure."

Life with Eleanor became a private trial for F.D.R. Siding with Roosevelt, Bishop calls Eleanor "a harpy" and takes a sympathetic view of the fact that the President never fully broke off his relationship with Lucy, not even when, in 1920, she married a wealthy Manhattan socialite named Winthrop Rutherfurd. Hidden in a private Secret Service car, Lucy attended all four of Roosevelt's Inaugurations. He phoned her constantly, speaking in French if a member of his staff was in the room. They often met secretly in Washington's Rock Creek Park. Lucy would climb into the back of the big, seven-passenger limousine with the President, and they would drive slowly for an hour along the winding roads.

Roosevelt worked out ingenious ways of visiting Lucy at Tranquillity, the Rutherfurd family estate in northern New Jersey, while Secret Service men kept watch and newsmen wondered where he had gone.

Historians of the Roosevelt era tend to treat F.D.R. 's affair gingerly, implying that it was platonic, at least in its later years. Bishop himself feels that the relationship was sexual but lacked the definite proof to say so in his book.

Secretive Years. During all these secretive years, Eleanor never learned of her husband's enduring romance.

F.D.R. was protected not only by his staff but also by family members, including Daughter Anna, whom Bishop extensively interviewed.

Lucy was naturally invited to Warm Springs in April 1945, when F.D.R. went south to try to recover his strength. She was accompanied by an artist friend, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, who was to paint a portrait of the President.

On the morning of April 12, F.D.R.

complained to Dr. Bruenn of a slight headache and a stiffness in his neck. But he was in a fine mood. There was to be a barbecue that night, and for the first time he had put Lucy's name on the official guest list. Apparently he was be yond worrying about his wife's feelings.

As he posed for his picture, the President went through his wallet and tossed something into a wastebasket: it was his draft card, which he had carried throughout the war.

As Bishop describes the scene, Lucy Rutherfurd was smiling as she watched Roosevelt. Shakily, he raised his left hand to his forehead. "I have a terrific headache," he said softly. His eyes were on Lucy as he slumped forward. Mrs.

Shoumatoff screamed for a doctor.

Then, realizing the situation, the artist took charge of Lucy and hustled her out of the room. The two women hastily packed and were miles away in a car when Roosevelt died two hours later while Bruenn worked over him.

The coffin was being carried north on a slow train through crowds of mourners when Eleanor found out about Lucy Rutherfurd's presence at Warm Springs. In a rage, she later confronted Anna, who confessed that she had often helped her father meet with the woman. "He asked you?" cried Eleanor.

"Momma," said Anna softly. "I had a husband and children. I tried to fill Father's gap of loneliness. But I couldn't.

I just couldn't." Eleanor looked at her coldly. Bishop reports that she could bring herself only to say, "Well, I am sorry." With that comment on all the years of unhappiness, she left the room.

After the funeral in Hyde Park, N.Y., when the crowd had drifted away and workmen were shoveling dirt onto the coffin, Eleanor Roosevelt turned around and walked back alone toward the grave of her husband. A distance from it, she stopped. For a while she stood there, watching from afar, saying nothing. Then she walked away.

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